“I do not know, she’s really on my heart. I feel like something’s wrong, you know? And then a couple of days later, we got a phone call that she had appendicitis and was in the hospital.” Mrs. Liz Welton has a twin sister named Cecilia who, at the time, was living in Mexico for college. When it comes to twin telepathy, Welton shared, “It was the one time that I feel like I experienced it. I think the rest of it is closely shared experiences throughout our lives growing up. That is really what it is. We do think the same way because we had the same experiences, same value system, same teachers, same schools, I mean everything.”
Sophomore Anna Berkowitz claims, “It 100% exists.” Her twin sister Caroline agreed, sharing, “Sometimes we will just be thinking the same thing.” Anna continued, “It’s just when you spend a lot of time with someone, are really close to them, and kind of just catch on to their emotions, feelings, and mannerisms.”
Junior Flannery Northrup has a twin brother, Everett. She shared, “We understand each other on a level that [our] older brother and younger sister don’t, but I do not necessarily think telepathy exists. We just have a natural instinct to turn to each other when something funny happens and things like that.”
On the other hand, Ms. Justine Lassar shared, “Being a twin is the same experience as everybody who has a sibling; it is just a sibling. However, people love to make assumptions about what it is like to be a twin, and people like to imagine that it’s very different having a twin, and it’s not.”
Despite the apparent ease of making assumptions about twins, people cannot outright tell if an individual is a twin. Caroline continued, “People do not really connect the dots until I tell them and that people do not usually just think that we are related.
Everett shared, “If people find out I am a twin, they didn’t figure it out on their own.” Flannery said in her case, “It is the same thing, most people don’t know unless I them. I was more surprised that most people don’t even know we are related until I tell them, much less twins.”
Another common misconception is that twins of the opposite sex can be identical. As a fraternal twin, Everett shared, “I find it amusing as it is very obvious that we are fraternal.”
Looks may be an indication that a set of twins is fraternal, but so are their sexes. As science teacher Lassar summarized, “Identical twins are formed when one fertilized egg splits in two just like all fertilized eggs do, but in most humans, those two cells stick together. And in identical twins, something is a little loose between those cell collections and the two cells loosen so much that they split apart, but this is not possible in opposite-sex twins due to differing genetics.”
Lassar continued, “I believe every twin relationship is unique and that some twin pairs are super close, some twin pairs are kind of competitive, and some twin pairs have the same relationship as any other pair of siblings could have.”
When asked about her relationship with her twin, Welton reflected, “It is great fun to be a twin. You just feel more secure about everything because you have someone who’s going to be there with you.”
From fraternal to identical, there are a large number of twins among the student population at B-CC, with some pairs that one would never expect.
